UCL Discovery Stage
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery Stage

RMCA U-net: Hard exudates segmentation for retinal fundus images

Fu, Yinghua; Zhang, Ge; Lu, Xin; Wu, Honghan; Zhang, Dawei; (2023) RMCA U-net: Hard exudates segmentation for retinal fundus images. Expert Systems with Applications , 234 , Article 120987. 10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120987. Green open access

[thumbnail of RMCA U-net.pdf]
Preview
Text
RMCA U-net.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Hard exudate plays an important role in grading diabetic retinopathy (DR) as a critical indicator. Therefore, the accurate segmentation of hard exudates is of clinical importance. However, the percentage of hard exudates in the whole fundus image is relatively small, and their shapes are often irregular and the contrasts are usually not high enough. Hence, they are prone to misclassifications e.g., misclassified as part of the optic disc structure or cotton wool spots, which results in the low segmentation accuracy and efficiency. This paper proposes a novel neural network RMCA U-net to accurately segmentation hard exudate in fundus images. The network features a U-shape framework combined with a residual structure to obtain the subtle features of hard exudate. A multi-scale feature fusion (MSFF) module and an improved channel attention (CA) module are designed and involved to effectively segmentation sparse small lesions. The proposed method in this paper has been trained and evaluated on three data sets: IDRID, Kaggle and one local data set. Experiments are shown and indicate that RMCA U-net of this paper is superior to the other convolutional neural networks. The method in this paper is increased by 6% higher in PR-MAP than U-net on the IDRID dataset, increased by 10% in Recall than U-net on the Kaggle dataset and increased by 20% in F1-score than U-net on the local dataset.

Type: Article
Title: RMCA U-net: Hard exudates segmentation for retinal fundus images
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120987
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120987
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: RMCA U-net, Channel Attention, Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Module, Residual module, Hard exudate
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Health Informatics
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10177695
Downloads since deposit
76Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item